Suicide Squad (2016)
Starring: Will Smith, Margo Robbie, Viola DavisWritten By: David AyerDirected By: David AyerRelease Date: August 1, 2016Rating: C-
Summary: A bunch of bad guys are sent out on a mission to do stuff. That's really all I know and can say without giving away things.
My Thoughts: A movie is like a stew for me. You have your broth, or the basic plot of a film and that makes up the most of the film. Heavy or light, it holds everything together in it's soupy glory. Then there are veggies, or the characters. They float around in the soup and while they don't make up the stew, they move around the stew and create life in their movement, their color, size and shape, or their differences. Then there's your meat, your chunky, thick meet that sort of disrupts the balance between the veggies and the broth and that's the literal action, your climax, rising action, etc of a film that soaks up the plot. And while no film is perfect, these are elements when put together correctly in a way that is both visually and aesthetically pleasing, we have a good movie and in my opinion Suicide Squad is pleasing visually and aesthetically to some extent, but what it tries to pull off it in at the course of 2 hours is instead a mess, a fun mess, but a mess nonetheless.Going back to my stew analogy, Suicide Squad has all the elements of a stew, but in some aspects there is are too much of one thing and not enough another and let's start with the broth, or the plot.
The plot line of Suicide Squad is not so simple to follow if you aren't familiar with the comic book franchise like myself, but more importantly, there's so much to going on in the film it that as a viewer, you're a bit confused at what's happening here and there with this character or with that character and there just wasn't enough time for them to spell out in a coherent way, but that was the fault of the editing job that was done. There were so many scenes cut here and there, scenes that probably contained a good chunk of what the plot needed to build the world and explain what exactly was going on, but for the lack of time or whatever, they decided to cut those parts out and add what they did. There are scenes with all to many jump-cuts adding an awkward fast-pacedness to scenes where they weren't needed. There are action scenes that cut away too quickly to move onto something else when it could've been extending or elongated to better them. Too much broth, or not enough, or basically an imbalance of it in this case leaves an awkward amount of room concerning characters and actual plot points in the film and that's what happened here. The plot of the film was too much, which left little room for the characters to fully be fleshed out. The veggies of the broth are extremely important as they vary in sizes and shapes, so there has to be enough room for all these colorful characters within the plot of a character and they have to interact well in order for not only the movie to be entertaining, but the stew to be tasty because you don't want to add a pomegranate along with a bunch of carrots to a beef stew as that just wouldn't be appetizing. (Unless that's your thing) But in this case it isn't the interactions between the characters that the issues lie. If anything, that's the great part about the movie and there are some great performances in this film, like Will Smith, who I can never see as anyone else but Will Smith, Viola Davis, who ultimately scared the hell out of me, and Margo Robbie, who stole the show as Harley Quinn and ultimately nailed her character. The characters all have this lively, fun energy around each other and while there are some cringe-worthy lines, (more so than actual good ones), where the issues lie are characters singularly and how they develop over the course of the film. Short story is: They don't. Here we have characters that are artificial and plastic to begin with. You have too many unfleshed-out characters, it creates this excess of a watery, paper thin taste and in the case of this film, we have a lot of this and thus we have watery, paper thin veggies and no one likes those in their stew. I have no prior knowledge about most of the people in the squad, so a little exposition should've been included in order to fully get them as people that we're supposed to sit and watch for 2 hours. I wanted to know what makes them so evil because time and time again, that's all we hear from anyone about them. Its even how the film has being marketed, but we're just pretty much told so without being given much of a reason why. We know Harley Quinn is insane, but what about Captain Boomerang or Katana? What makes them so evil that they're put in a squad with someone like the likes of Harley Quinn? You get some sort of justification in just about everyone accept Harley Quinn and Deadshot's one sentence introduction, but it wasn't enough to really push the "evil" factor that the film was trying to create. What we got a bunch of anti-heros, rather than straight-up villains, which is where the movie succeeds. It made us like these supposedly bad guys and even root for them in the end, but I would've liked to see them do more "bad guy" things or at least have been shown that these people are bad. It felt more like a missed opportunity to make a great film because characters like El Diablo or Harley Quinn or Katana, who have such tragic backstories deserve a little bit more than a couple of sentences for explanation and it felt more like justification for their actions as villains, but because we didn't see much of their villainy, it didn't hold much weight.
Lastly, there's the meat of the stew: the different acts of a film, the climax, the rising action. These aspects are basically nonexistent as there was too much going on in the film to even pick out plot points. We have an obvious beginning and end, but there really is no point of rising action, neither any climax. The entire movie felt as if it was this long on-going sequence with added music sequences that weren't really needed to liven the mood during down times and fast paced jump cuts to move the film along even further when you were just getting into where it was at the moment. The film is 2 hours long and it felt like 20 minutes. There was no point where I felt any urgency or need for the characters to get somewhere and do something and there was no point where I was anxious for that final battle as one typically is during a comic book film because everything was so condensed together that it felt more like this never-ending quest. There was so much to soak up that it leaves you will a watery, plastic-like taste in your mouth that makes you wish it could've been better because it could've been so much better, but there's only so much you can expect from a movie like this. It's a fun, summer Blockbuster. It is nothing like Deadpool which could be attributed to it's PG-13 rating and sub par character development, however, it is also nothing like Batman v Superman because it is fun, it makes you laugh (not often, but the jokes are there regardless of how forced and awkward some of them are) and while you're watching it, you really are having a good time. However, once you leave the theater, that's a different story.
Suicide Squad (2016)
